Captivated by the intricate patterns of manufactured places, I make drawings of contemporary urban landscapes. Generally speaking, my colored pencil drawings deal with themes of uncertainty and optimism within our cities. Pushing buildings and bridges to their breaking point allows elements of abstraction to blossom within their gestural and jovial forms. When you look at my work up close, you see every individual window and roof that makes up a city. From a distance, you see an intricate grid that is as planned and stable as much as it is fragile and disordered.

Underlying these themes, the drawings are concerned with confused, visual perceptions. Disrupting and abstracting an expected, gestalt image creates a slippage within a fixed system. Reliable patterns emerge and dissipate with remarkable fluidity. What if we are also navigating unseen worlds that exist all around us? The drawings contemplate the question, and whether we are conscious of it or not.

My process and my materials are ambitious and compulsive. In order to gather reference materials, I often charter helicopters. Flying in a small aircraft with the doors off, with nothing but air between me and the traffic below, allows me to intuit the vast sprawl of the city as it intermingles with the individual’s sense of fragility.

Colored pencils are mostly known as a hobbyist material and they lend themselves well to an obsessive process. Pressing down to create dark, opaque, densely layered planes, my drawings are often grand in size. Unlike painting where an artist can use large brushes to cover vast areas, the labor of my work is plainly seen. The drawings are handmade, never with rulers, and not mimicking CAD drawings. The city is infused with subjectivity.

Ultimately, cities are large projects that shrink and grow over many generations. It’s easy for the individual to feel small, as if we were at the mercy of history, politics, and disasters—natural or other. Interwoven within all the material, lies the temporal. When intuition and familiar, hand drawn forms connect, this ambiguity can capture the unnamed.

For better or worse, we create cities together, and these manufactured spaces are where life happens at its fastest and boldest: failure and fantasy, possibility and dread, hope and disappointment, invention and destruction. We are working with a limited perception. The world we created grows regardless, and my drawings reflect this.

Orange County Arts Grant (Grand Prize), 2008
Outstanding Thesis/Project Report in the College of the Arts, California State University, Long Beach
San Francisco Art Institute Community College Scholarship
Central Coast Art Association Scholarship